ATLANTA – It might just be the best thing ever to happen to Vernon Davis. Well, perhaps not the absolute best, but it has to rank right up there with the time he took his first spill on a sheet of ice while attempting to slide a granite rock toward the house.

“Embarrassing,” Davis, the beguiling tight end for the San Francisco 49ers, said. “Curling, man, it humbles you.”

Not nearly as much as being on the wrong side of a raging lunatic – aka most any losing football coach. The repercussions from Mike Singletary’s 2008 takedown and public spanking of Davis still linger. At the time – October, Singletary’s first game as head coach of the Niners -- Davis was slack-jawed that anyone would dare banish him to the locker room as punishment after drawing a personal foul penalty.

“He’s crazy,” Davis said, describing some of the kinder thoughts spinning around his head back then. “Did he really just do that to me?”

For kicks and inspiration, youth coaches around the planet still play Singletary’s legendary, blistering audio from that day. Turn it up and you can practically hear the spittle fly.

“I will not tolerate players who think it’s about them when it’s about the team. Cannot win with them, cannot coach with them, can’t do it,” Singletary raged, as the object of his ire turned purple. “I would rather play with ten people and just get penalized all the way until we gotta do something else rather than play with 11 when right now that person is not sold out to be a part of this team.”

It took some soul searching, but Davis eventually came to understand how his egocentric, me-first attitude was sabotaging his evolution as a player and as a human being. There was a particular madness behind Singletary’s crazy speech, one that taught Davis “the more you put the team first, the more success you have.”

Those who were present for that 2008 clash of titanic egos might have done a double take here Sunday while walking past Davis in the visitor’s locker room at the Georgia Dome. They might have been on their hurried way to speak with Colin Kaepernick, Michael Crabtree or Frank Gore about the 49ers’ flamboyant offense, but instead those folks stopped to marvel at Davis’ insight and growth.

“Opportunity, man,” he was saying after the Niners’ 28-24 victory over the Falcons vaulted San Francisco into the Super Bowl, where they’ll meet the Baltimore Ravens. “Without opportunity, you have nothing. Each and every week it’s always been a priority to get me into the offense. It’s just that the defenses play us a certain way and it just doesn’t happen. We’re winning. I can’t complain about that. All I can do is pump my fist and say thank you.”

Singletary’s audio ought to feature a postscript of how the ideal team player now sounds, how maturity and advancement of the mind now looks.

Something about the heat of January playoffs brings out the best in Davis. For the second straight postseason, he has seized the spotlight and made it his own. Against Atlanta he hauled in five catches for 106 yards and a touchdown, exactly one yard more than he had totaled across the previous seven games.

Last year against the New Orleans Saints in the NFC divisional playoffs, Davis snagged a 14-yard touchdown pass from Alex Smith with nine seconds left (as part of 10-catch, 180-yard performance), sealing a wild, back-and-forth final quarter which featured four lead changes in a span of 3:53. Davis then bolted to the sidelines and collapsed into the arms of Jim Harbaugh, the current Niners coach who has all of Singletary’s fire but is otherwise a whole different sort of character.

That moment seemed certain to keep Davis in a rare stratosphere, for he’s a tight end with singular talents – a 6-3, 250 pound body that’s near impossible to drag down, sprinter’s speed, good if not great hands and an ethos that would now make any coach proud – but for much of this season he’s been curiously unremarkable.

Early double teams could be blamed. Later, once Kaepernick took root as a starter, Davis’ own superb blocking skills put him in an odd place in the dazzling pistol offense. Before last Sunday's breakout game he had caught only one pass in each of the previous five games, with no touchdowns.

Never did he complain that he was being ignored among all the Niners’ weapons. Never did he pout or grumble off-the-record about a role that (to outsiders) seemed diminished. Mostly he’d turn every conversation about him into a complimentary soliloquy on the joys of playing alongside such talented offensive threats.

Davis, like everyone else, still finds himself straining for fresh ways to describe not just the gravitas of Kaepernick, but the QB’s preternatural calm in the crux of chaos.

“He takes a deep breath and just gets it done,” is how Davis describes Kaepernick’s internal motor, which is as good an explanation as any.

Then there is wide receiver Randy Moss, another veteran who is rewriting his own legend through advanced maturity. After all the selfish acts of his youth, Moss has developed into as fine a mentor as he is a player. Receiver Michael Crabtree, meanwhile, has a special chemistry with Kaepernick. He caught one more pass than Davis on Sunday, but averaged only 9.5 yards on six receptions (and had that one awful turnover on the goal line), while Davis had 21.2 yards per catch.

Atlanta’s fear of the damage Kaepernick might do with his feet or the trouble he could inflict with Crabtree loosened up the scene for both Gore and Davis. Gore had 90 rushing yards and two TDs on 21 carries. Davis zigged through the Falcons’ zagging defense, pulling open on drag routes or fooling linebackers over the middle while Crabtree fought double teams.

Afterward, Falcons coach Mike Smith looked as if he had personally been steamrolled by the pistol offense. In particular, he noted the toughest problem for his defense was the guy who had blended in throughout much of the year.

"Covering the tight end," Smith said. "The tight end was an issue. They made a number of explosive plays with the tight end."

The Ravens, according to their website, have allowed only one postseason touchdown pass to a tight end since 2001. This is one of those stats that would have made a younger Davis hiss with anticipation. But Baltimore knows it can’t allow him to run free the way the Falcons did. (Baltimore also must know the only apparent way to beat the pistol offense is to outscore it – all the way up to the final second.)

“I’m going to do whatever I can to help this team, whether it’s blocking, pass protection, whatever it is,” Davis said. “I’m going to make sure I’m there and I’m a vital piece to the offense.”

He still wears his emotion like a silk tie, on display for the world to see. But he’s learned to channel some of his inner fire into passions not involving frothing linebackers. He owns a Bay Area art gallery that showcases emerging artists. He’s a fashionista, a designer, a curler.

Yes, Davis still digs the sport of curling after picking it up a few years ago. That led to him being named honorary captain of the Men's U.S. Olympic Curling team for the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. There he began to view sports through a different prism, saw how they really do bring the planet together.

“It was a great lesson,” said the man who long ago learned a big one, and now pays it forward as best he can.